Slim Randles is my guest today with an essay about Spring that encapsulates how many of us view this season of the year – new growth, new hope, new wonder.
In the spirit of all that is wonderful about Spring, here is a picture of some wild flowers that pop up everywhere here in my corner of the world in March. I’m not sure what they are. I thought they were a wild crocus, but they are not.
Now here’s Slim. Enjoy…
Spring mornings are a lot like Christmas. Each day we get up and go out into the yard, or walk along the creek or visit the horses in the pasture. And each day, each morning, we find something new the sun has brought us.
Pinfeather leaves of an unbelievable green now start showing on cottonwoods that have stood like stark ghostly frames all through the cold winter. Hopeful blades of grass peek through clumps of brown left over from last summer’s verdant pasture.
Everywhere we look there is something new and different.
A lot of this Christmas-in-spring is kept just among us, because we might be accused of being … well … poetic if we told people why we were really carrying that coffee cup out into the yard. So we say lame things like “I think I’ll get some of that fresh air this morning.”
What we really mean, of course, is “I want to see if Richardson’s bay mare has had that foal yet.”
Some of us have worked very hard last fall and winter to prepare for this spring. By grafting. OK, we have a Granny Smith apple tree. Let’s see if we can’t get a branch of Rome Beauties or Jonagolds to grow on it, too.
And we understand completely that where we live no olive tree can survive the winter. That isn’t supposed to stop us from trying, is it?
Nature pitches us a boatload of challenges each day that we’re alive. This plant needs more water than falls naturally here. That tree can’t take the temperatures we get. This little tree needs soil with more organic matter in it.
And those challenges are the stuff winter dreams are made of. We do the best we can to cure the lack, the freeze, the drought, and then we wait for April.
We wait impatiently until we can come out of the house some morning and check the grafts on the apple tree and see tiny green leaves coming on the grafted branch. We search the bare ground where we planted that new kind of seed that won’t grow here – to see if it’ll grow here.
It is a continuing feast of green, a triumph of anticipation. An April morning can make us want to sing.
Brought to you by Strange Tales of Alaska, available now on Amazon.com.
In addition to hosting a radio show, Slim Randles writes the nationally syndicated column, “Home Country” that is featured in 380 newspapers across the country. He is also the author of a number of books including Saddle Up: A Cowboy Guide to Writing. That title, and others, are published by LPD Press.
If you enjoy his columns here on the blog, you might want to check out the book Home Country. It features some of the best of the columns he has shared with us, as well as the 4 million readers of the newspapers where his columns appear.
Reminds me of spring on the farm. When the sun sets, I’m already anticipating the sunrise and early morning coffee on the deck listening to the world wake up. Don’t know what those flowers are, but they are lovely.
Those early mornings on my little farm in TX were special, too. There’s nothing quite like it.